Four crew members is more than enough. If there were 6, then every gun would be manned and the engineers could relax on the hull, pretty much. That would eliminate all the strategy, and therefore the whole point.

I've been playing since the beta, and four has always seemed like a perfect crew size for all the ships. They're designed to have four players, and letting there be more would defeat the purpose. If Galleons had crews of 6, they would never go down. And really, a lot of the extra crew members would just spend the entire match camping on the hull/balloon. While that would be useful, it wouldn't make the game any more fun.

Four is plenty.. it seems like too few whan you start, but once you get the hang of things you see that having four crew keeps it interesting and challenging. If you had five or six there would be no urgency to teamwork, and DM battles would reach a stalemate with noone able to muster enough firepower to get through the repair capability.

I'm closing ranks with my fellows in opposition, four is enough. At the start of playing the game it is certainly overwhelming, yet when I have a team of coordinated individuals it's like a well oiled war machine spitting out death to every corner.

Four well organized crew members are enough to effectively use any ship in the game. Even if you had six to eight crew members on a ship, it wouldn't matter much if they don't follow orders, or position themselves badly. Before you go asking for more crew ask yourself if you are making the best out of the crew you have.

IF you were to implement a system where the size of each crew could be increased, it would have to be across the board for all ships. Allowing the galleon to have more people while not allowing every other ship to would be a bit absurd.

There isn't a ship in which 6 crew members technically couldn't find something to do. All ships have at least 3 guns, 1 pilot slot, and a hull and balloon and engines to occupy engineers, so I could see it working in concept, though I think the downtime would sizable in many situations and reduce the fun.

I don't see any problems with making it a match option as long as six is the max (even five as a max would be reasonable). You could even go the other way and increase the hectic nature of the game by allowing a min of three slots.

Why not create a new larger class of ships that are designed for 6 or 7 crew? Then make a new game type where there can only be one of these new ships and the other two are the current type.

This way you'll have one big slow ship that can really lay down the firepower, but would be easy to pick off by the smaller ships if caught alone. The idea of a small flotilla comes to mind. That way there is another level of movement planning that needs to be coordinated between all of the captains.

I just started playing yesterday, but that was the first thing that came to mind after a few games.

They could allow for crews to be adjustable. for example, can have one ship have 1 less crew and then the other ship get 1 more. You will weaken one ship and strengthen the other. I think this would keep the balance of the game since the other team would then focus on the weaker crew ships, and the stronger crew ship would have more of an advantage in combat. this would also allow for smaller crew ships, that have more speed, and larger crew ships down the road. But at not point in time change the number of players actually playing.

I just started playing yesterday, but that was the first thing that came to mind after a few games.

Don't take this the wrong way.. but a lot of people are making very similar suggestions after playing the game for a couple of days. It would be interesting to know what these same people think after a couple of weeks. The crew size limit appears daunting to most players at the start, but after a while it's part of the challenge.

I just started playing yesterday, but that was the first thing that came to mind after a few games.

Don't take this the wrong way.. but a lot of people are making very similar suggestions after playing the game for a couple of days. It would be interesting to know what these same people think after a couple of weeks. The crew size limit appears daunting to most players at the start, but after a while it's part of the challenge.

This. I'm getting tired of people making suggestions based entirely on their complete lack of experience. Report bugs, sure. But major suggestions relating to the game's content? You need to learn more about the game before you do that. The only people who suggest boarding and other silly things like crew size increases are the ones who've yet to even play for 10 hours.